News agencies

News agencies are the least studied media in Social Sciences, because of their origin, the service to other media, acting as intermediaries between events and information companies (Jiménez, 2011). Along these lines, De Bustos and Pastor (1995, p. 21) affirm that "news agencies are the companies that are mainly dedicated to the elaboration of all kinds of information to be sold later". Jiménez (2011), as a result of the classification of the aforementioned authors, and according to various functions, makes a more current classification (table 1):

Source: Self-made based on DeBustos, Pastor, and F (1995) and Jiménez (2011)

The battle of the agencies for the coverage of international news is fought fundamentally between four big houses: Associated Press, Reuters, France Press, and the national one EFE (Gelado, 2009).

Any media professional or communication scholar knows that the role of press agencies in the Spanish and world media panorama is much more important than it transcends to the general public. Without them, the multiplicity of information and entertainment to which mass communication has been subjected in recent years would be difficult to understand (Frost, 2019). However, the fact that they have offered such an exercise from birth to their powerful present, does not mean that they have not brought a good number of consequences of doubtful desirability (Gelado, 2009).

An example of a negative consequence due to the indiscriminate use of news agencies is that most of the large Spanish and foreign newspapers are fed by several news agencies, but none of them is outside the western sphere (the example could be extrapolated beyond our borders with a high probability of success); therefore, the ethnocentric bias is guaranteed (Gelado, 2009). As Muro Benayas assures (2006, p. 22):

[…] Although impartiality and rigor are attributes that are part of the imagination of all agencies, their practice is associated with a certain worldview -Anglo-Saxon, Arab, Latin American, or Asian- that hovers above the neutrality of its editors.

All this, in practice, translates not only into a much lower volume of news for certain parts of the planet, which could be justified by the proximity criterion but also in the creation of certain stereotypes referring to other cultures, at the same time that it results in the difficulty of elaborating an honest portrait of the countries and cultures with the scarce number of news articles dedicated to them (Gelado, 2009).

Chomsky and Herman (1990, p. 69) state:

“The mass media model acts as a propaganda asset through various filters, among which the following stand out: 1) the size, concentration of ownership, and orientation of the dominant companies, 2) advertising as a source of income, 3) the dependence of the media towards the government and/or companies, and, 4) the action of pressure groups on journalists”.

Similarly, the news that comes from international agencies and media outlets have a certain influence on the impressions and attitudes of the people who receive the message towards the country to which they refer (Domínguez, Romero-Rodríguez, & Aguaded, 2018), especially because most audiences do not have access to the plurality of information on international events (Wu, 1998; López-García, 2006; Torres-Toukoumidis et al., 2017.

Ultimately, the only way to neutralize the bias effect of the agencies would be either to multiply their number, diversify their origin, or make more domestic media completely independent of their influence, even if this would imply getting rid of the obsession with immediacy in which the vast majority has been immersed for some time (Gelado, 2009).

The "ventriloquist effect"

After delving into news agencies and understanding what their most significant tasks are, it is understood that these organizations easily determine the nature of the international public, as well as public affairs and their treatment (priming, framing, and gatekeeping) with consequences such as the spiral of silence (Day, 2018) or the bandwagon effect. This is because both journalists and the public trust them basically because they dominate news distribution channels (Tunstall, 2008), that is, their credibility is based on the very foundations of their exercise (Rivera-Rogel, Zuluaga-Arias, Ramírez, Romero-Rodríguez, & Aguaded, 2017; Rodríguez-Hidalgo, Rivera-Rogel, & Romero-Rodríguez, 2020).

The “ventriloquist effect” according to Arraez (1998) is defined as “multiple media, one voice”, that is, as a selection of news that is broadcast through multiple media, but that comes from the same agency (paraphrased or not). Advances in studies on the «ventriloquist effect» have led other authors to generate new definitions such as the one offered byToukoumidis, Romero-Rodriguez, Casas-Moreno, and Aguaded (2017) or TTejedor-Calvo, Romero-Rodríguez, Moncada-Moncada, and Alencar-Dornelles (2020) who defend that this effect consists of informational perspectives that are based on public opinion due to the lack of capacity of the media to generate other frames. With the development of technologies, the concept is questioned and new ideas arise such as the one proposed by Day (2018), which defines the «ventriloquist effect» as a political, economic, and cultural dominance that has been in continuous growth and is in crisis due to the emergence of new digital voices. Likewise, along the same lines,Frost (2019) states that it is a threat to democracies, the plurality of thought, and the quality of information, considering it a source of misinformation due to bias that must be detected.

The economic crisis that began in 2008 was a severe blow to the media, news agencies, and advertising in general. In Spain, between 2008 and 2013, a total of 284 media outlets were closed because advertising investment had fallen by more than 50%, generating economic losses and eliminating 11,151 jobs (Madrid Press Association, 2013). As a consequence of this decline, the media chose to reduce production costs, reducing their circulation and production, dispensing with their workers abroad -correspondents-, going to international news agencies, and migrating to digital platforms, which strongly affected the informative quality and result of the final news of the media (De-Pablos & Mateos-Martín, 2004).

Due to the support of the media in international news agencies throughout this period, it is essential to highlight the current role of news agencies and transnational networks in the news oligopoly of matters that go beyond national borders. The changes that the conventional media are undergoing, such as the press, radio, and television, compete in the information ecosystem with social networks and digital media. This situation has forced the national media to reduce the costs of news production (De-Pablos & Mateos-Martín, 2004), which increases dependence on international news networks –v.gr. CNN, BBC, Al Jazeera, among others– and international agencies –v.gr. Reuters, AP, AFP, EFE, etc.–.Aspinall (2005) points out that the national media tend to have a large number of journalists displaced to key places within the same territory, although the situation changes when it comes to reporting on foreign affairs because for such tasks, journalists seem incapable of personally covering the news, either due to the lack of support for coverage outside their borders or because of the cuts in personnel.

This somehow originates a "ventriloquist effect", in which a single or few informational perspectives are accepted as true by all the media, due to the inadequacy of the media system to corroborate the facts with journalists in the place of the events (Arráez, 1998). This phenomenon could also occur because the different media, as stated by Rodgers (2003, p. 6), “draw from the same sources”. Other authors, such as Arroyo and Yus (2007), do not hesitate to affirm that most of what we read in a newspaper comes from the information that news agencies provide.

For his part,Cooper (1957) referred to this phenomenon in the 20^th-century meridian, when he explained how, at a wedding, the bride asked him what he did: "Have you heard of the Associated Press?" to which the bride replied, “Of course! –exclaimed the bride– My husband always reads it. In all the newspapers”. Therefore, it can be said that these agencies and transnational media determine the agenda-setting, the framing, and its different versions, generating the opinion matrices of any event. Although there appears to be a "plurality of biases", in reality, it is nothing more than the result of their paraphrasing -like a sounding board- in each media outlet or in the information that is shared through social networks. This is exactly what causes the «ventriloquist effect», which can be summarized as “multiple media, one voice” (Arraez, 1998).

[…] This could lead to the unification of informational and programming criteria, even when editorial lines seem dissimilar, so the multiplicity of channels or options should not determine informational, ideological, or freedom of expression pluralism, but that it could rather be a direct reflection of a greater business concentration of ownership of these media. This is, at the same time, illegitimate due to its effects, due to the continuous exercise of a descending linear power that seeks that the receivers act in a different way than they would with truthful information (Romero, 2011, p.8).

Along the same lines, Noëlle-Neumann departed, at the beginning of the 70s, of «consonance» as one of the origins of the uniformity of journalistic information (Dader, 2009). «Consonance» represents the similarity between the ideas, beliefs, and values of the media, which would explain how under an apparent model of pluralism with a multitude of headlines, a great homogeneity of topics can be hidden (Noëlle-Neumann, 1973).

This social edge is important in the academic field, not only in the one that is based on the critical or Marxist theories of communication of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse, or Habermas, but also in the one that deals with control, which advances at a dizzying pace, and the decrease in competition for the globalizing flow that it creates as a transnational oligopoly of media, increasingly centralized in large conglomerates in which realities are expressed in a single way of thinking, undermining plurality (Rubido, 2009).

According to GGurevitch, Levy, and Roeh (1991) and Clausen (2004), the coverage of international news is subject to certain frames, in the sense that international agencies and media maintain determined cultural inclinations trying to frame (framing), construct (agenda setting), and estimate-prioritize (priming) events from the dominant discourse of their audiences, generally from the Western approach, where respect for Human Rights, democracy, the rule of law, and institutionality, are conclusive elements in the creation of the discourse. Through framing, the media connects with the masses, defining the situation of an issue and establishing a position to generate a debate. Framing allows us to identify how the media address a newsworthy event and, in turn, determines the effectiveness of the coverage (Nwakpoke, et al., 2020).

Authors such asSeaton (2003) have been interested in the problem of the repetition of news, a fact that, as mentioned in reference, comes from an excess of trust or even dependence of the different media with the international news agencies. This situation, whose consequences in the field of pluralism are as obvious as they are pernicious, is intensified if we take into account other derived aspects. In particular, 3 aspects that can weaken the information sent to the reader will be highlighted.

• Ethnocentric bias.

With an ethnocentric bias, we refer to the fact that both the main news agencies and their audiences are generally Western, so the framing of the news is oriented to a single society (Sanz & L, 2007). AsBenayas (2006) assures, although objectivity and rigor are qualities that are part of the values of all agencies, their practice is affiliated with a certain worldview -Anglo-Saxon, Arab, Latin American, or Asian- which is above the bias of its editors (Benayas, 2006). This encourages agencies to regularly offer a different type of coverage for similar events, depending on where they happen on the globe (Branston & Stafford, 2003).

• Other sources

International news agencies do not tend to ensure that their journalists can witness all the events they write about (Fenby, 1978). Moreover, when the newsworthy reality surpasses them, they use the resources of people who are in a position to know what has happened. An example of this is the case of the magazine Der Spiegel, where one of its journalists has written manipulated news based on data taken from other media and film images.

In this regard, Tuchman (1978) states that communication professionals use quotes as protection to get away from events. This process of transfer of responsibility and accountability does not have to end here (Bishop, 2001); For this reason, it is not surprising that in an almost continuous process of paraphrasing, the final reader of a news item can actually become the last link in a chain of sources that refer to sources that, in turn, refer to other sources.

Television and radio networks or even Internet portals (Laso & Iglesias, 2002) seem to be governed even more by the limitations derived from intense competition and the exacerbated desire for immediacy, so that dependence on agencies can occur with even greater intensity (Domingo Santamaría, 2006).

• Agenda-setting effect

International news agencies maintain a remote-control system, which has a consequence that the increasingly high audience is exposed to an increasingly diminished news agenda (Gelado, 2009). Therefore, if there are fewer "voices" telling the rest of the media what is news and what is not, there is a greater chance that there will be a greater number of events that remain outside the news agenda (priming that generates gatekeeping and, in derivation, volitional omission and censorship). As a consequence, it seems that the reality is that only a small number of events become reviewed news (Hall, 1973).

On the other hand, the reiteration of the speeches in each one of the media outlets only reduces pluralism, insofar as it makes the number of publications unimportant since what matters, in the end, is the number of agencies that provide information to the media (Gelado, 2009). According to the same author (op. cit., 2009), such repetition contributes to the agenda-setting effect and also produces that not only themes are repeated, but also that stereotypes are sustained.

Misinformation, "ventriloquism effect", and digital media

The Internet has meant, with its boom and popularization, not only positive aspects but also problems such as oversaturation and infoxication, which will be discussed later. This has caused a special change in the way of information consumption and the crisis of the conventional media (Shenk, 2003). The appearance of social networks and digital platforms brings with them characteristics such as immediacy, omnipresence and ubiquity, interaction, and, in many cases, gratuitousness, pressing all media to share these characteristics, which makes it difficult to distinguish between information, rumors, and misinformation. According to López–García (2004), this situation leads to abandoning the traditional media as the main source of information.

Content publishers on the Internet produce their own news reports but research on news content in the digital realm shows that they generally mix it with a large amount of content from secondary producers, such as push services, normally provided by major electronic journalism portals that provide a continuous flow of content and information.

These Internet services originate their own content based on international news agencies with little or no changes. Therefore, agencies reach audiences well through their own websites, as well as all other major online news providers (such as Google News). Although news agencies have historically tried to minimize their public exposure, they now rely on popular appeal and brand names for digital audiences and are now aggressively marketing their names in the "electronic journalism" sector. The information provided, however, rarely comes from news agencies other than AP or Reuters.

Global multimedia information conglomerates, such as the Associated Press (AP) and Reuters, dominate Internet news for the most part in a low-key way, and their superiority appears to be growing. Thousands of media outlets around the world do original reporting on occasional mass stories, such as war, but international coverage, in most other cases, is left almost exclusively to news agencies (Toukoumidis et al., 2017).

The convergence manifestations have given rise to a sector of electronic journalism in which the production of information on public affairs is more concentrated than it already was. Such trends indicate that a global information infrastructure that contradicts popular thinking and dogma will be indifferent and unable to challenge existing inequalities. What then happens with multimedia concentration is a large number of secondary effects, typical of the current communication ecosystem, and which causes the aforementioned "ventriloquist effect".

As can be seen from the above, like any change in the system, the overcrowding of the Internet has brought about new problems, which have produced different consequences:

• Oversaturation and infoxication of the communication spectrum (v. gr. Shenk, 2003, p. 396-397; Cornellà, 2010; Carr, 2011). This is due to the growth and importance that social networks have acquired since they have become a repository of information and a means of exchanging it.

• The decentralized distribution of fake news (v. gr. Lotero-Echeverri, Romero-Rodríguez, & Pérez-Rodríguez, 2018; Sartori, 1998; Ortega, 2006) (Lotero-Echeverri, Romero-Rodríguez, & Pérez-Rodríguez, 2018; Ortega, 2006), which, although it has always existed in conventional media, through the Internet reach a great impact and virality (Pauner, 2018). Fake news, according to Quandt, Frischlich, Boberg, and Schatto-Eckrodt (2020), is constructed through falsification of facts, accidental errors, negligence, and intentional manipulation.

• Increase in the crisis of the conventional media that has fostered the reduction of journalists' workforce (v. gr. Thom, 1992, p.14; López-García, 2004, p. 23).

• The multiplication of information without verification, which produces misinformation. The term misinformation is used to refer to the intention to manipulate people through dishonest information (Del Hoyo, et al., 2020)

• The impact that automated bots and social media algorithms have had on the population, segregating information to the tastes and interests of each user (Frost, 2019; Tejedor-Calvo et al., 2020).

These aspects can constitute a perfect setting for structural misinformation in the ecosystem, having an unsuspected scope and for which no social institution was prepared (v. gr. Pérez-Rodríguez, 2003; Pérez-Tornero, 2005; ) (Lotero-Echeverri et al., 2018; Romero-Rodríguez, Razo, & Torres-Toukoumidis, 2018).